Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions by Gillian Whitlock (review)

The introduction of Gillian Whitlock’s Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions immediately alerts readers to its impressive scope. The book successfully draws connections between life writing produced and read in disparate places at disparate times by disparate audiences in order to demonstrate the ways in which life writing can articulate the impact of conflicted human subjecthood on bodies, lives, and peoples. The book is divided into two parts along a temporal logic, but variations on the term “divided” are inappropriate descriptors for Whitlock’s text, given its constant attention to unexpected connections between groups of texts.

Part 1 focuses on what we might broadly call “pre-contemporary” case studies. Chapter 1 traces and compares the textual histories of two life narratives published in 1789: Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Watkin Tench’s Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay. While the two texts are written from starkly different perspectives, those of an emancipated slave (Equiano) and a British Marine Officer (Tench), both “offered an autobiographical account that gave witness to the previously unseen, and in turn called upon the reader to bear witness to unknown and scarcely imaginable scenes from the ‘New World’ ” (16). In chapter 2, Whitlock compares the two texts from chapter 1 to a 1796 letter from an Australian indigenous man, Woollawarre Bennelong, and argues that, similar to the first two narratives, the letter testifies to the individuality of Australian indigenous people and the dynamics of first contact. Chapter 3 analyzes Saartjie Bartman’s (famed as the “Hottentot Venus”) 1810 argument that the “freak shows” in which she was featured were not exploitative but, rather, reflected her free will. This decision, in Whitlock’s estimation, gives us “insight into humanizing discourses in colonial modernity” (36) because she refuses to be subject to discourses that frame humanitarian actions as necessarily compassionate (40).

In chapter 4, Whitlock contrasts Mary Prince’s 1837 History with Equiano and Bennelong’s texts, arguing that the Prince’s text “reveals how gender and sexuality constrain the voice, embodiment, and agency that become available for women in the slave narrative” (46). She further argues that Baartman and Prince’s texts indicate that cultural discourses limit the extent to which women’s bodies are legible in testimonial narrative. Chapter 5 turns to Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush, written between 1832 and 1852. Moodie’s humanitarian sensibility and white civility reflect on her portraits of indigenous women, “resulting in a portrait of the noble savage, which is implicated in discourses of indigenous peoples as a dying race” (56). Chapter 6 reads what is usually identified as the first autobiography by a Canadian indigenous man, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (1847). Kah-ge-ga-gah-Bowh (known in English as George Copway) testifies to traditional practices and mobilizes the Christian language of suffering to demonstrate the negative impact of the eradication of these practices by settler colonialism. Chapter 7 takes stock of the whole of Part 1 and Rousseau’s Confessions into conversation with these case studies. Here, Whitlock accurately summarizes Part 1’s accomplishments in mapping the opportunities provided by life writing and suggesting the various texts’ ideological (humanitarian, democratic, and recognition-based) proximities to one another.

Part 2 consists of four chapters that tackle contemporary case studies. Chapter 8 considers texts produced in the aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc), anchoring its argument in Antjie Krog’s trilogy of memoirs collectively known as Country of My Skull. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory of economy of affect, Whitlock demonstrates that a memoir can become an authoritative account of bearing witness at the trc but can be co-opted and appropriated by well-meaning “ethical engagement” when it is circulated. As always, Whitlock draws connections here to earlier chapters, indicating that Krog’s testimony, like Prince’s and Baartman’s, uses the “resources that were available to resist the gift of benevolent recognition” (93). Chapter 9 reads representations of...